The view in the West came to be that science and Christianity are not friends in the search for truth. In the late 1800’s Andrew Dickson White published a book entitled “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.” Christendom is the incorrect use of the word here because it correctly refers to a medieval form of government of church/state. However, while historians and philosophers of science believe that the warfare is a myth, “warfare” came to be descriptive of an uneasy relationship in the public sphere (e.g. media), even till the present time. For over 300 years from the rise of modern science the relationship between science and religion was an alliance. Scientists were typically Christian and saw no conflict. These included Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin. The notion of free enquiry, debate, association and dissent had been carefully nurtured in the Christian Western culture. But the idea of a warfare was an engineered political enterprise by secular thinkers who aimed to undermine the cultural dominance of Christianity, and to replace it with naturalism. Naturalism is the view that nothing outside nature is real and the only way to discover truth is through science. This is however a category fallacy on the part of naturalists in that scientific facts are a different category to culture. Still today liberalists forge allies with the likes of cultural Marxism and totalitarian Islam in their quest to destroy Christian Western culture. They have been largely successful, but the fall is yet to come.
Philosophers of science today realize that the warfare between science and religion is an oversimplification. White’s book is today regarded as propaganda. Some careful thinkers now acknowledge that science and religion should not be regarded as foes, but are two semi- or non-over-lapping domains. The slogans “Science deals with facts and religion deals with faith” is a caricature of both science and religion. Because science inquires into the universe the problems and questions that are philosophical cannot be resolved scientifically, but by a philosophic or theological perspective. Religion can with the same data available through science make factual claims about the world and can make various claims about origin and nature of the universe and humanity. This is where dialog between science and religion partially overlap. And this has been happening during the last decades in forums and journals.
Science and religion have discovered that they have important mutual interests and important contributions to make to each other, and those who don’t like this can, in the Christian culture, choose not to participate in the dialogue.
Science and religion serve as allies in the quest for truth in various ways:
Science writer Loren Eiseley has highlighted that science is “an invented cultural institution” which requires a “unique soil” in order to flourish. The Christian culture uniquely provides the structure in which science can flourish. With science not being natural to mankind modern science sprang out of European civilization because of the unique contribution of the Christian faith to Western culture, even in the mist of the 1500 year Islamic Caliphate onslaught on Europe. It is the Christian world and only in the Christian world which finally gave birth to the experimental method of science itself. In contrast to other monotheistic, pantheistic or animistic religions, Christianity does not view the world as divine or as indwelt by spirits, but rather as the natural product of a transcendent ordered rational Creator. Therefor because the cosmos is rational it is open to exploration and discovery.
Science is constructed on conventions that cannot be proved scientifically but are guaranteed by the Christian world view. Christian religion is relevant to science in that it can furnish a conceptual framework where science could not even exist without the laws of logic and mathematics, the ordered nature of creation, the reliability of our intellectual aptitudes, the objectivity of the moral values. Yet these assumptions cannot be proved scientifically but are philosophical assumptions which are intrinsic to Christian world view.
Falsification and verification sound like processes to avoid by the uninitiated. Can science falsify or verify religious claims? Yes. What does that mean? When religions make claims about the natural world they make predictions which scientific investigation can either verify or falsify. For example, a religious claim that the moon used to consist of 5% cheese which has now been eaten by alien zombies is not falsifiable. In other words, there is no way that the claim can be tested, cannot be verified as true, and therefor in scientific jargon is termed ‘not falsifiable’. When science states that the Creation is falsifiable it means that there are means of accessing the truth or falseness thereof. The view of ancient religions that the sky rested on the shoulders of Atlas or the world on the back of a great turtle is falsifiable. Some Eastern religions assert that the world is divine and therefore eternal. This is falsifiable in that science has shown that all matter, energy and space came into existence at a point in the finite past before which nothing existed. One of the principal doctrines of the Judaeo-Christian faith is that the universe had a beginning. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth” (Gen. 1.1). Originally this teaching was renounced by both ancient Greek philosophy, materialism and modern atheism. Then in 1929 with the discovery of the expansion of the universe, this doctrine was dramatically verified. Against all expectation, science thus verified this religious prediction. The Christian claim is that the world is the product of intelligent design. During the last forty years, scientists have been astounded by the complex balance of initial conditions in the ‘Big Bang’ in order for the universe to permit life including intelligent life. In the various fields of physics and astrophysics, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and biochemistry, discoveries have repeatedly disclosed that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a delicate balance of physical constants and quantities. If any one of these were to be slightly altered, the balance would be destroyed and life would not exist. We now know that life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours. To mention only one of many scientific opinions, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.
More on this can be studied in a book written by Stephen Myer “Intelligent Design.” This is a good read for all levels, and includes a narration on the interesting history of science.
Physicist David Park: “As to why there is space-time, that appears to be a perfectly good scientific question, but nobody knows how to answer it.” Here theology can help. God as a necessary being whose non-existence is impossible, who is the Creator of the contingent world of space and time. Thus, the person who believes in God has the resources to quench science’s thirst for ultimate explanation.
This reasoning has a simple argument: 1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause). 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. 3. The universe exists. 4. Therefore the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.
The arising of life from non-life (abiogenesis), sometimes called the second ‘Big Bang’ or second singularity, cannot be explained scientifically. Secular scientists just say, “so there . . it happened just like the ‘Big Bang’”. Abiogenesis must precede any evolutionary processes – the one rides on the back of the other - yet belief in evolution continues. Current neo-Darwinian synthesis (evolution) not only does not address abiogenesis, but in the face of the pre-Cambrian Explosion seems to be deficient in its explanation of the gradual rise of biological complexity. Neo-Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection work far too slowly to produce life.
Barrow and Tipler, in “Anthropic Cosmological Principle”, list ten steps in the evolution of homo sapiens. These include the development of the DNA-based genetic code, the origin of mitochondria, the origin of photosynthesis, the development of aerobic respiration, etc. Mathematicians have shown that each of these ten steps is so improbable that before any one would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the earth. If this is the case, then why, apart from a commitment to naturalism, should we think that it evolved by unaided chance? As a result mathematicians are no longer invited to speak at evolution conferences. Random mutation and natural selection have trouble accounting for the origin of irreducibly complex systems. Michael Behe, in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” explains that there is no understanding within the neo-Darwinian synthesis of how irreducibly complex systems can evolve by random mutation and natural selection. Current evolutionary theory has zero explanatory power. Behe contends that irreducible complexity can only be explained by intelligent design. Here again religion can help science.
According to WIKI, Spontaneous generation refers to an obsolete body of thought on the ordinary formation of living organisms without descent from similar organisms. This theory held that living creatures could arise from non-living matter and that such processes were commonplace and regular. For instance, it was hypothesized that certain forms such as fleas could arise from inanimate matter such as dust, or that maggots could arise from dead flesh - spontaneously. The doctrine of spontaneous generation held from before Aristotle (300BC) and was taken as scientific fact till it was disproved by the work of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall in the mid-19th century. It was also in the mid-19th century that Charles Darwin published his work “On the Origin of Species (or more completely, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’)”. In a time that science thought that living cells were nothing more than blobs of plasma Charles Darwin wrote that should the problem of irreducible complexity not be solved, that his evolutionary theories would be worthless. The book “Darwin’s Black Box” by Michael Behe can be read on this subject. Irreducible complexity means a single system (example the eye) which is composed of several interacting parts, and where the removal of any one of the parts (example the retina) causes the system to cease functioning. The implication is that an orchestra of functioning components would have to evolve simultaneously for natural section to select for the benefit of the organism. With each cell being more complex than a city and not just a blob, Darwin’s concern is more problematic than he thought.